As promised, this is the follow-up to this post – a collection of free, online resources with which to help improve your craft.

This isn’t meant to be an end-all be-all for writing advice, especially when you consider I’m not breaking this into genre. I’m sure you can find specialized advice for your specific genre if you look, I’m just looking at general writing advice.

Websites:

There are no doubt millions of writing-related websites out there. But here are some of what I use and read and follow.

The Writer’s Digest has been a backbone for years for writers, and they have a page of free advice for writers.

Coursera is great for learning about a lot of things. While most of the classes do have a paid option, and some you must pay for, many of them you can audit completely for free – and still get access to peer reviews. I strongly recommend looking into this option if you’re looking to start getting peer reviews but can’t afford a traditional workshop.

Reddit has at least one writing community (and in reality many subreddits). /r/Writing and /r/WritingPrompts are good places to get started!

Tumblr:

Tumblr is a huge network of thousands of blogs. It’s hard to direct you in the right way, not knowing your specific genre, but here are some of my favorite blogs.

@WriteblrConnects is a good way to start getting your foot in the door as far as Writeblr goes.

@HowToFightWrite is one of the best blogs out there as far as writing action goes.

@SimplyOriginalCharacters can help you with your character development. (Disclaimer: I wrote a post for them, of my own free will, unpaid.)

@TheWritersHandbook has advice and links and all sorts of things. It’s a good all-around blog to follow.

There are also masterposts on just about any topic conceivable on Tumblr – a quick search of “writing masterpost” turns up a ton, so don’t forget to go looking for that too! (Another writing resources masterpost here!)

Youtube:

M. Kirin is super personable and just always has lovely things to say and their advice is always spot on. They also have a Tumblr!

Terrible Writing Advice is, well, exactly as advertised. It is a hilarious deconstruction of tropes and if you watch to learn what not to do, it’s actually really useful. So… it’s not actually as advertised. Go figure.

Miscellaneous:

There is mountains of information out there and in the end I just don’t have time to sort through it all. Here’s some of my raw websites and information I’ve collected, or things in formats not really covered above.

A collection of free printables – best used with a printer, though you can probably copy some of the information over to a notebook or a word processor.

For podcasts, I’m personally fond of Grammar Girl, but there’s a whole slew of them. I don’t listen to many personally, but here’s a list of 20.

Kindle – no, don’t laugh, really. They have so many free ebooks from people. Drop a review for your fellow authors, but you can get hundreds of writing ebooks for free and you don’t have to have a fancy device to read it, just the app.